|
The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend
first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at
once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards
magnitude [physical extension] they proceed to bodies
progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the
very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too
feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed
downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness.
As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in
the bodies entered, or to the accidents of life, or to
upbringing, or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to
all these influences together, or to specific combinations of
them.
Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the
destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their
own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne,
have the strength of self-mastery in all that is left to their
own act; they have given themselves to another dispensation: they
live by the code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is
woven out of the Reason-Principles and all the other causes
ruling in the kosmos, out of soul-movements and out of laws
springing in the Supreme; a code, therefore, consonant with those
higher existences, founded upon them, linking their sequents back
to them, keeping unshakeably true all that is capable of holding
itself set towards the divine nature, and leading round by all
appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt.
In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is
determined by the descendent beings themselves.
|
|